TI9 help with unclear restore options

I now have 2 320 Gb Sata hard drives on DellP4 w/XP. Call them C for main drive put in as replacement for failed drive; S for second identical drive and also have F, a USB drive with images. I have never restored from an image and want to practice by restoring to S and then changing boot order in the BIOS to boot from restored image on S. I have already done a fresh install on C and am booting normally from it now.

Using TI9, build 3667, and restoring from within Windows. Two things make me hesitate:

I select S (identified on this screen as disk 2 ) and the next screen says " The destination hard disk drive you have chosen contains some partitions that could contain useful data. Hard disk drive image restoring is possible only if the destination hard disk drive is empty." This hard drive should not have any partitions or data - it is virgin. I have not proceeded past this. Is this a false statement by TI or something here i'm not aware of?

If your drive 'C' in the PC is not split up into more than one partition (C is a partition of itself), then you do just tick the whole drive plus MBR option, this does relate to the image on your backup drive 'F' and also that you want your restore to be bootable by also restoring track 0.

The message is just poorly worded (I wish Acronis would bite the bullet and perhaps ask one of its' English beta testers to comment on their text messages).

The next message you get about drive S is probably because it has been formatted, if you can see it in Windows Explorer, it has been low level formatted.

So you can proceed. Don't reboot until you've disconnected your original drive, as your system can become confused if it finds two bootable drives.

Colin,
Thanks for the reply - helps my confidence a lot. I had hoped to have S bootable by only changing things at boot. My partner absolutely would not open the case and do anything inside. Care to venture an opinion - might it be possible to disable C in Bios rather than remove cables - and could there be serious consequences for just trying it?
Brian S.

The best answer would be to use some form of boot program that can hide the other drive at boot time.

Colin[/QUOTE]

I've got Acronis Disk Director on trial to get the OS Selector. When I try a restore to 2'nd HD (S) I get a time remaining of 13 minutes until the required reboot. Then the time goes to 10 hrs, 13 hrs, 16 hrs 10 hrs etc. Waited for 1 hour and gave up.

Trying to restore from Rescue disk the program hangs at selecting Disk and MBR and that's it. I hit Next and then Next, Back and Cancel gray out and only recourse is to power off.